


The day after

by mkhhhx



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Feelings Realization, Gen, Light Angst, M/M, New Beginnings, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Running away to the countryside, That fine line between deep platonic friendship and romantic attraction, this is just soft and self-indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:55:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28960560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mkhhhx/pseuds/mkhhhx
Summary: "It's nice here, isn't it?" Jeno looks at Donghyuck, the angle weird and the setting sun getting into his eyes, although he wouldn't have it any other way."It's nice everywhere you are," Donghyuck presses his cheek on Jeno's chest and it's something so simple, a moment of tranquillity that holds nothing extraordinary but has Jeno's heart bursting with pure, unfiltered adoration.
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Lee Jeno
Comments: 7
Kudos: 57





	The day after

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone and welcome to one of the most self-indulgent fics I've ever typed :') 
> 
> If you know me you're probably aware that like nohyuck, I too want to run as far from the city as humanely possible, so there's a good amount of self projection happening in here.  
> The original idea for this came to me while listening to Troye Sivan's "Take yourself home", especially the "I'm tired of the city, lets die somewhere pretty," part, although the fic isn't that angsty.
> 
> I did my best to proof by myself but as we all know typos and mistakes are insistent and sneaky, so sorry about that in advance.

"It's nice here, isn't it?" Jeno looks at Donghyuck, the angle weird and the setting sun getting into his eyes, although he wouldn't have it any other way.

"It's nice everywhere you are," Donghyuck presses his cheek on Jeno's chest and it's something so simple, a moment of tranquillity that holds nothing extraordinary but has Jeno's heart bursting with pure, unfiltered adoration.

Jeno knows he loves Donghyuck.

He knew he would love him since they laid eyes on each other on their first year of university. He knew he loved him when they started living together three years after their initial meeting. But at that exact moment, sprawled on the swing chair with Donghyuck resting half on top of him Jeno finds out he loves him even more than he thought, loves him in another way that exceeds platonic friendship but Jeno cannot yet put into words. He's not ready to say it yet, he isn't ready although he feels like he was always ready for this; to hold Donghyuck, to kiss the top of his head, to bask in the last rays of sunlight with him, both comfortable with only few words shared between them. It's at that specific moment when he realises that Donghyuck isn't his university friend, isn't his roommate, isn't the person closest to his heart. He is way more; he is something for life.

If a few months ago someone told Jeno he'd be there, at his grandparent's house, watching the sunset with Donghyuck he'd laugh at their face. The city was never good to them but at the same time it was all they had known for most of their adult lives. Neither was born there, Donghyuck coming from the warm and sunny north and Jeno from the slightly colder south. After getting their degrees, as many of their friends, they stayed there by default, Jeno and Donghyuck moving out of their tiny dorm to an equally tiny apartment, close enough to the bottom tier fast food restaurant Donghyuck was working at to cut a bit from transport expenses. Jeno was mostly working at home for some generic e-shop while making ends meet with the odd job here and there; giving out pamphlets, helping the elderly couple at the upper floor, babysitting sometimes. It was not even close to ideal, barely passable as decent with the rent and bills always looming over them, but Jeno was at least thankful they had a roof over their heads.

That changed on an otherwise calm Tuesday. Jeno was too patient for his own good, but that was when Donghyuck finally snapped. Jeno remembers his message, the simple _Please come take me back from work_ , sent during what was supposed to be the middle of Donghyuck's shift. Jeno had found him crouching at the pavement close to the back door of the restaurant, his patchy coat draped over his greasy work clothes. _"I got into a fight with the new manager and she fired me,"_ he had said to Jeno when they walked back home hand in hand. Simple as that.

Donghyuck had been working there since his second year of university, going from part time to full time after graduation and eventually to overtime on a regular basis. The pay was never good enough, but the few bonus and promises as time went by kept Donghyuck from calling it quits, knowing that looking for a new job was hard in the middle of an overpopulated city. And then a new manager came in and Donghyuck's stress paired with 12-hour shifts day after day completely blew up.

Donghyuck had talked about leaving the city many times before. He was always vocal about hating the grey buildings and the tiny apartments and the fast pace, but that night, when Jeno took him back home Donghyuck's voice was laced with a new kind of desperation and Jeno knew it was an ultimatum, not from Donghyuck to him, but from the whole universe to the both of them.

And Jeno, Jeno who was never the one to make rushed decisions, never the one to seek new things, Jeno who flourished under his boring and repetitive daily life knew that he couldn't keep Donghyuck back anymore. He also knew that he couldn't live without Donghyuck which was an exaggeration as much as it was true, even when he didn't share that thought with anyone but himself. They had been living together for so long already, they were each other’s best friends, they had gone through so many up and downs by each other's sides. So Jeno knew; if Donghyuck was to leave, Jeno would follow him to the end of the world.

On the following day, a Wednesday, Jeno sat by Donghyuck's side in the bathroom and they burned his work uniform in the shower. It smelled terrible and they almost had to call the fire department, the greasy clothes with the company logo sewed on more plastic than anything, but it ultimately felt good. And Jeno right then and there had an idea.

"Our lease is up in a month," he had told Donghyuck who was sitting on the shut toilet lid. "Let's not renew, let's go to my grandparent's house."

Jeno hadn't thought this through, not at all. He hadn’t been at his grandparent's house in years, not since his grandma passed away when Jeno was just shy of finishing high school. For all he knew, the house could not be standing anymore due to lack of maintenance in years.

"We can do that?" Donghyuck had asked, voice and eyes hopeful and Jeno couldn't bear letting him down in any way.

"I don't know in what condition the house is..." Jeno was aware there wasn't any technology and the old wood under the roof was probably rotten at places. "But nobody is staying there, and we wouldn't have to pay rent."

Jeno didn't know if there was any worth living there, the village tiny, mostly elders left tending to their gardens and looking after grandchildren at holidays and summers. The nearby towns were small too, so Jeno doubted there would be many job opportunities.

"Let's do it," Donghyuck had said and Jeno didn't any more convincing.

So that's how they ended up there, in a huge house in the middle of nowhere without proper heating. The first couple days were weird, to say the least, Jeno turning the key into the lock and opening up to something familiar in the most melancholic way. The whole house was frozen in time, dusty, damp at places, the staircase grunting ominously under their weight.

"We can do it," Donghyuck had smiled, warm like the sun and Jeno has never not believed him.

Jeno had kept working to put as much extra money aside as possible, stretching his mobile plan thin using the internet while Donghyuck was trying to take care of the house with the help of friends who knew a bit about plumbing and woodwork and YouTube tutorials. By the end of the first week Donghyuck had worked some wonders, the living room, kitchen, bathrooms, and bedrooms having functional new lightbulbs and the old as time heater they fished out of the chaotic storage room working enough to not freeze to death.

The following weekend they informed their landlord they wouldn't be renewing their lease and did the trip back to their apartment to fetch more of their things. It would take maybe one or two trips back and forth more, their apartment filled to the brim with everything they've accumulated the past half decade. Jeno was thankful his grandparent's house was big enough to spread everything out, to not have to deal with overflowing closets and the feeling of suffocation of too many things in too little space that used to make him almost nauseous at times.

Jeno never knew Donghyuck was so crafty, the last of his money going on paint and waterproofing materials and small electrical parts and every other little thing the house needed, spending a solid week just cleaning every corner and crevice until not even the storage room looked scary anymore.

"I think we can really live here," Donghyuck had told Jeno over dinner, Jeno worn down by too many hours of his eyes straining while working and Donghyuck from painting the outside with a brush extender twice his height. "I wasn't sure at first, but now I almost am. Thank you Jeno."

And it's weird, to be at the house Jeno spent most of his childhood summers with the most important person of his adult life, two worlds crashing and merging. Letting his thoughts wonder he could envision it so clearly; a few months or a few years later, settling seamlessly to a new kind of life. Still with Donghyuck, always with Donghyuck.

He doesn’t know how to say anything that's on his mind, or how to put his thoughts in order, or even how to tell Donghyuck how thankful he is they're doing this together. So instead, he just smiles and says the same thing he did when they first stepped foot into their shared apartment after living the dorms.

"Welcome home, Donghyuck."

The first few months hold a lot of surprises for them, as expected. Jeno installs wi-fi in the house, way slower than what they had in the city but it works just fine, both occupied with maintenance or chatting, or even reading the old books scattered around sitting side to side instead of staying in their rooms and playing videogames until the early hours.

Together they clean out the storage room, which makes for a great walk down the memory lane, seeing what is salvageable and what they will have to throw away.

"That was my grandfather's," Jeno trails the armrests of a light brown rocking chair with his fingers. He's scared to try sitting on it, knowing it might not be able to support his weight anymore, but he doesn't have the heart to throw it out or turn it into wood for the fireplace. He used to sit on his grandpa's lap and rock back and forth listening to his stories, his grandma knitting on the couch a few feet away.

"We're definitely keeping it," Donghyuck smiles, dragging the chair to the living room, as if he knows that's where it belongs.

They go through old photos, toys from when Jeno was young, loads of books and old clothes and other trinkets that hold the house's secrets. They keep what they can, arrange for other things they have no use for to be donated and throw away the rest, the house decluttering and filling up with their own personal colours at the same time.

At some point between deep cleaning the fireplace and testing his abilities to make the old chunky television cubicle work Donghyuck finds a job at a diner in the nearby town. It's only a ten-minute drive with the car and it pays even better than his previous job, his boss allowing him to bring leftovers home at the end of his shift.

So Jeno works from home and starts cleaning out the garden. They want the soil to be ready ready at spring when they're planning on growing their own produce. Donghyuck works his eight hour shifts and fixes the floors in between and it's good. After years and years of living together only now Jeno understands the full extend of his deep-rooted feeling of domesticity he experiences in close proximity to Donghyuck.

Their friends and Jeno's parents don't say much, but they seem to think they have lost their minds. "Just leaving like this?" Jeno's mother tells him on the phone. "It's nice that you want to take care of the house but there aren't any chances of professional growth there, what are you gonna do, be a shepherd?"

And Jeno listens to the whole lecture time after time, humming along as if he agrees that this is only a short-term solution, a break and that his professional growth should come above everything else. He doesn't tell anyone that yeah, he thinks that with Donghyuck by his side he could be the happiest shepherd in the world. And maybe he must tell Donghyuck, say something about how Donghyuck’s gaze makes him feel, but there were never too many complicated words between them, not from Jeno's side at least because Donghyuck was usually in charge of the emotional talking.

But by the time winter starts wearing off and they spend their evenings at the swing on the porch drinking chamomile Jeno knows his time is running off. He should rip the band aid off and tell Donghyuck he's falling head over heels for him. What's the worst that could happen, anyway? He is self-assured enough; Donghyuck would never push him away.

He falls deeper and deeper. He isn't sure if it's something new, or he can only now see the feelings he's been keeping inside him for long, but it is magnificent, either way. He falls in love with the way Donghyuck tends to their growing garden, with how he talks to the plants and leaves food out for the stray cats that visit every now and then. He falls in love with the way Donghyuck picks up his grandma's old knitting wool and tries his hand on it, creating the sloppiest scarf Jeno has ever seen, one that's made solely out of love. He falls in love with Donghyuck who comes home in his greasy work clothes and kisses Jeno's cheek instead of a greeting. He doesn't know how he wasn’t seeing it before, something that is so big and bright, something that could never be overlooked. He is so, so in love with Lee Donghyuck.

"Do you think we could stay here?" Donghyuck asks. He's sitting on the porch and feeding the kittens that live in a card box there. "I mean, long-term, could you see this? Us?"

"Yes," Jeno answers simply. "I can see us here tomorrow," he says. "And the day after," Donghyuck looks at him and Jeno wishes he'd take the step between them to kiss the crinkles by his eyes. "And that is enough for me."

"Lee Jeno," Donghyuck smiles. "I'm so happy we found each other," the sun is setting, the horizon is the prettiest pink and Donghyuck's messy dark hair falls on his shiny eyes. "I needed you."

Jeno smiles. Smiles and feels his heart bursting in real time, his heartbeat so rapid he is sure Donghyuck can hear it. "And I needed you," he replies and Donghyuck’s expression shifts, oh so slightly. It feels like a confession, it feels like Jeno's soul can finally be at peace: they are on the same page, they are together in whatever they are trying to do. And Jeno thinks that what they are trying to do is quite simple, really; just be happy.

Donghyuck keeps working at the restaurant. He brings Jeno leftovers and stories from his customers; the elder lady that lost her husband but loves chatting with Donghyuck when work is slow, the bunch of teenagers that always order too many fries to dip in their milkshakes, the lawyer who never dines in, fetching take out for his family of six. Wonderful people living their wonderful lives and Donghyuck being a little part of them, Donghyuck who brings the sunshine to everything he touches, Donghyuck who was the one to snap first but has been the rock Jeno needed in his life prior and after.

They don’t talk about it, but they do kiss. Kiss bearing the weight of those three words that feel too small to accommodate the full extend of Jeno's emotions. They kiss at the garden between their growing plants; the blooming life all around them and the kittens -their kittens- playing nearby. Jeno's hands are dirty with soil and Donghyuck's sweat is seeping through his shirt, but it's perfect. It's perfect when Donghyuck takes Jeno's hands into his own and looks at him for a moment too long; asking for permission, asking to close the miniscule distance between them and Jeno leans in first instead, closes his eyes and lets himself be kissed, lets Donghyuck’s lips brush against his own and smiles against them.

It's chaste, as all of their next kisses are. They kiss on Jeno's bed that they sometimes share before falling asleep. They kiss on the swing at the patio, knocking Jeno's chamomile mug out of his hand, spooking the cats and laughing about it. They kiss at the dinner table when Donghyuck comes back home. And it feels right, showing their love in practical form.

Jeno quits his job in the middle of the summer. He is tired of emails and phone calls and deadlines. He is tired of not meeting people face to face, of not having conversations with strangers every once in a while, of waiting for Donghyuck to come home by himself.

"At a convenience store?" His father's voice echoes from the speaker. Not even frustrated anymore, just tired. "What about your degree?"

"I'm happy," Jeno answers, although he knows it's in vain. He wishes his parents would understand, but he has stopped having such high hopes. "I am so happy."

"That damn boy is making you lose your mind," his father exhales, and the line goes dead. Jeno doesn't call his parents all that much after that.

"We could get some chickens," Donghyuck says as they wake up together all over each other. Jeno rolls on the other side of the bed to face him, feeling the warmth radiating off Donghyuck's body in waves. In the heart of the summer they sleep naked with the rusty fan on and it's still not enough, although Donghyuck seeks him out in the middle of the night and they both overheat.

"Chickens are a long-term commitment," Jeno exclaims, mind still sleepy and lazy and so, so in love with Donghyuck it hurts.

"So are our kittens," Donghyuck smiles, pressing dry, curved lips on Jeno's chest. "So am I."

"Are we really doing this?" Jeno keeps his eyes shut, knowing there's too much sun sneaking in from the broken window blind they keep forgetting to fix. "You and me, here?"

"Yes," Donghyuck's hand rubs circles on his cheek, a reminder that they made it so far, that the bad days are long behind them. "You and me and our little growing family."

One of their cats jumps on the bed because it's their feeding time. Jeno's shifts starts in a couple of hours and Donghyuck’s ends a little after Jeno will be back home. Sometimes they kiss and sometimes they look at the sunset, cuddling on their swing. Sometimes the phone rings and Donghyuck has to hold his hand through a talk with his parents. Sometimes one of their chickens or rabbits escapes and they have to search the whole neighbourhood in the dark.

He loves Donghyuck at all times. And Donghyuck loves him back. Jeno loves him today and knows that he will love him tomorrow, and even the day after. And that is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!  
> You can find me [here](https://twitter.com/kuns_dimples)!


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